Though I once worked for a business magazine, I never read any others. I had also never heard of her company, Theranos. Among the recipients that year was Silicon Valley legend, Andy Grove, getting the lifetime achievement award.Īlso on the list, getting the “global benefactor” award at this 2015 event, was someone I had never heard of, Elizabeth Holmes. I’m not big on attending conferences, but made a point to go to an awards event at a favorite forum in September 2015. I have covered Silicon Valley as a journalist and author for three decades now. If there was anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company they should “get the fuck out.”
Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. Copies of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho had been placed on every chair. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. "The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015.
When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.įor years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.
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